Lucy Forbes came from sketch comedy and directs drama as though the joke and the wound land on the same beat. This Is Going to Hurt made a labour ward funny to us and unbearable to everyone in it, and we rate her for that.
Fi1m perspective
A junior doctor on a labour ward in 2006 turns to us and says the thing he cannot say to anyone around him. That is the shape of This Is Going to Hurt (2022), whose first four episodes Lucy Forbes directed, and it is the shape of most of what she does: the camera stays with one person's view of a place, the comedy comes from the gap between what they think and what they can say, and the drama comes out of the same gap. Forbes and Tom Kingsley share the directing; hers are the episodes that set the tone.
She took the long road to it. From around 2009 she was directing sketches for Charlie Brooker's Weekly Wipe and Bring the Noise, with commercials alongside, and she has said herself that the chances came later than she wanted. In My Skin (2018) was the turn, the first drama that was properly hers, and the one pointed to for its mix of mental-health realism and humour. Then lead director on the second series of The End of the F*ing World (2019), then This Is Going to Hurt, Great Expectations (2023) and all six episodes of Eric (2024), which she also executive produced.
What she does is not complicated to describe. "Comedy and drama walk hand in hand, they're the same thing," she told the BBC in 2022, and the shooting is built to make that true: plain, clean set-ups, a point of view we stay inside, room for actors to improvise. Benedict Spence has photographed thirteen of her projects, which lets a director stop worrying about the lens and watch the performers. She trained as a performer rather than a director, and it shows in how much of the frame the actors are given. On This Is Going to Hurt we laughed at Whishaw for most of the first hour and then felt the laugh go sour, because the episodes never let us forget that the rota is running him into the ground and that the people he is rude to are on it too. Ambika Mod's trainee, the reason to stay, gets the same attention as the star.
The weakness is the same as the strength. The asides to camera are hers to establish, and by the middle of the run they had worn thin for us; a device that tells us how to feel gets in the way of acting that was already doing it. Beyond that there is not much of a case against her yet, and that usually means nobody has made it. Six episodes and a producer's credit is a heavier load than four, and the thing to watch is whether that clean, one-person view survives when the material gets bigger. It is an easy habit to keep in a sketch and a hard one to keep across six hours.
Biography
Lucy Forbes is a British television director from London. She began her career directing comedy sketches and panel shows, working with performers including Charlie Brooker and Aisling Bea, before moving into scripted drama.
Her credits include all episodes of the BBC series In My Skin (2018), four episodes of the second series of The End of the F*ing World (2019), the opening four episodes of This Is Going to Hurt (2022), and the Netflix series Eric (2024). She has also directed Great Expectations (2023).
Forbes won the BAFTA Cymru for Best Fiction Director for In My Skin and the RTS Award for Best Drama Director for This Is Going to Hurt. She was included on the Alice Initiative's Emerging Female Directors list in 2019.
